West Wittering Swell Statistics, All Year: Surf with Light or Offshore Winds

This image shows only the swells directed at West Wittering that coincided with light winds or offshore conditions over a normal year. It is based on 22700 predictions, one every 3 hours. The direction of the spokes show where quality surf generating swell comes from. Five colours show increasing wave sizes. The smallest swells, less than 0.5m (1.5 feet), high are coloured blue. Green and yellow illustrate increasing swell sizes and red shows the biggest swells, greater than >3m (>10ft). In both graphs, the area of any colour is proportional to how commonly that size swell occurs.

The diagram implies that the dominant swell direction, shown by the largest spokes, was WSW, whereas the the prevailing wind blows from the WSW. The chart at the bottom shows the same thing but without direction information. For example, swells larger than 1.5 feet (0.5m) coincided with good wind conditions 0% of the time, equivalent to 0 days. Open sea swells exceeding >3m (>10ft) are unlikely to happen in a normal year. Taking into account the proportion of these swells that coincided with forecast offshore winds, and given the fact that West Wittering is quite sheltered from open water swells, we calculate that clean surf can be found at West Wittering about 0% of the time and that surf is messed up by onshore wind 9% of the time. This is means that we expect 33 days with waves in a typical year, of which 0 days should be surfable.

IMPORTANT: Beta version feature! Swell heights are open water values from NWW3. There is no attempt to model near-shore effects. Coastal wave heights will generally be less, especially if the break does not have unobstructed exposure to the open ocean.